“If I wasn’t a football coach and if I wasn’t married, would you date me?”: Brenda Tracy claimed Mel Tucker made unsettling comments amid scandal

Michigan State athletic director Allan Haller suspended Mel Tucker without pay due to the scandal surrounding him on Sunday.

Activist Brenda Tracy, who worked with the Spartans on and off as a consultant, filed a report with the university complaining that the coach made sexual comments and masturbated during a telephone call with her back in 2022. Allegedly, Tucker admitted to masturbating in a consensual sex phone call. He also claimed that Brenda Tracy wanted him to be her "Sugar Daddy."

Tracy is a rape survivor, turned activist.

She reportedly claimed that during a 2021 phone call that Mel Tucker asked her:

“If I wasn’t a football coach and if I wasn’t married, would you date me?”

What was Brenda Tracy's relationship with Mel Tucker?

Over the last two years, Brenda Tracy and Mel Tucker have had a working relationship, as the coach invited her several times to campus to speak about her advocacy work to his student-athletes. She was even named as a Spartan honorary captain.

What should have been a force for good derailed into a scandal, with the activist reportedly claiming that on April 28, 2022, the coach made unwarranted sexual advances towards her during a phone call. According to the complaint she later filed, Tracy stood frozen for several minutes as the coach masturbated on the other side of the line.

She told USA Today:

“The idea that someone could know me and say they understand my trauma but then re-inflict that trauma on me is so disgusting to me, it’s hard for me to even wrap my mind around it, it’s like he sought me out just to betray me.”

Mel Tucker reportedly claimed to the investigators that Tracy distorted their consensual relationship.

“Ms. Tracy’s distortion of our mutually consensual and intimate relationship into allegations of sexual exploitation has really affected me,” Tucker wrote in a March 22 letter to the investigator. “I am not proud of my judgment and I am having difficulty forgiving myself for getting into this situation, but I did not engage in misconduct by any definition.”

Brenda Tracy, the activist at the center of the Michigan State scandal

Therein lies the question for the investigators to answer, with Mel Tucker claiming that over months they had developed a mutually consensual romantic relationship. The coach claims that she wanted him to be her "sugar daddy" and for him to send him monthly payments. He acknowledged to have sent her several gifts and contributing to her nonprofit.

Brenda Tracy acknowledged having maintained contact with the coach outside their work environment. She also claims to have attempted to set boundaries and to have told him that they couldn't date given that they worked together.